Digital Marketing

Nov 21 2023

Elevate eCommerce Holiday Marketing With These 3 Strategies

While the rest of the world celebrates holidays on their given calendar dates, those who work in eCommerce operate on a slightly different schedule. Translation: Back-to-school prep begins before summer even starts and Christmas promotions are decided before a single leaf falls! With the holidays starting earlier every year, eCommerce businesses must lean in or get left behind. This year, elevate your eCommerce holiday marketing with Summit’s best strategies.

Step 1: Planning, Planning, and More Planning

Establish Clear Objectives

Like we said: once the holidays start, they don’t stop! Jot down campaign, ad, and other creative ideas throughout the year because you never know when they might come in handy. Approach the holidays with clear-cut objectives (and how you’ll measure them), but be willing to pivot amidst the hustle and bustle. Abstract objectives are about as clear as yellow snow.

Check Everything Twice (Like You Know Who)

Your customers are undoubtedly busy during this time, but they’re never paying attention to emails and promotions like they are during the holidays. Poor planning will be easy to spot and something as simple as a typo or a 404 error can land your email on the naughty list.

Engage Your Customers

Is there a weirder feeling than receiving a Christmas card from someone who feels like a stranger? If you’re not keeping up with your customers during the year, don’t expect them to knock down your door during the holidays. Create rapport and capture emails before the holidays with lead magnets like pop-ups, downloadable PDFs, and gift guides.

Step 2: Know What Your Customers Need (Even If They Don’t Know)

Preliminary Research

Just as you should be nurturing relationships with your customers throughout the year, it’s important to stay up-to-date with industry trends and insights. Do your homework on what your audience will be looking for this holiday season. Identify what pain points you overcome for your customer and position yourself as the solution.

Retargeting Campaigns

Implement retargeting campaigns to provide a personalized shopping experience for customers who have interacted with your site but did not make a purchase. With retargeting, you can display product-specific ads to audiences and engage them to buy, especially in light of holiday deals and promotions. Be sure to avoid cross-contaminating different campaigns by excluding retargeting audiences from any prospecting initiatives.

A/B Testing

For eCommerce holiday marketing that cuts through the noise, spend time crafting offers that not only grab your audience’s attention but add value to their lives. Perform A/B testing throughout the year to see how customers respond to different discounts (percentage vs. dollar amount, FREE shipping, gift with purchase, etc.).

Step 3: Make the Process Easy for Your Customers

Online Presence

Make the consumer purchase journey seamless from start to finish by improving your online presence. During the holidays, your customers are already in the mindset to buy. SEO puts you in the right place at the right time, boosting traffic to your site during the busiest time of the year. Our eCommerce SEO services employ industry-leading strategies to optimize your shop.

Website Layout

In addition to online visibility, the user experience of your website is instrumental to successful eCommerce holiday marketing. Slow, confusing, or unorganized websites won’t just cause you to lose out on a sale, but likely a customer for life. Ensure your site is clearly laid out with a mobile-friendly design to provide a premium customer experience.

Copy That Converts

Another key component to eCommerce holiday marketing is copy that converts. It’s the most wonderful time of the year, but it’s also the busiest – keep your message short and sweet. Using clear, actionable copy to guide your customer to your CTA, you can break through the noise of the holiday season and increase conversion rates.

Make the Most of eCommerce Holiday Marketing

Wrap up 2023 the right way with our eCommerce holiday marketing tips and make this your best season yet! With industry-leading SEO and PPC practices, you can boost revenue and sleigh your competition.

Want to make your marketing merry and bright? Schedule a FREE discovery call today!

Aug 14 2017

Get Found Online: How Small Businesses and Nonprofits Can Improve Their Online Presence.

In 2016, the verb “to google” was finally added to the Oxford English Dictionary, despite years of consistent use. Each year, Time Magazine releases a list of the most “googled” terms for that year. This list in 2016 contained words such as Trump, Hillary Clinton, Prince, Hurricane Matthew, and Pokémon Go. If you find yourself feeling guilty of googling any of these words, don’t worry! So did the rest of the world.

Needless to say, the past two decades we have seen Google take over the world. For some, such as the Alaskan Bush People, they choose to hide from the technological advances of the world and rely on nature and what they can do with their own hands. For others, such as people probably reading this post, we have made it our mission to advance WITH the world and embrace what our brilliant human race has created. Get Found On Google

This leads me to my hard thought topic of discussion. With the power of not only Google, but the entire World Wide Web, the possibilities are endless. Our culture is a culture of a get-rich-quick-reality-tv-vlogging-do-it-yourself-pinterest-loving phenomenon. I am definitely not critiquing these people because I am unashamedly next in line to try to take Joanna Gaines’ place on HGTV. But there is a constant theme here and that is this: Get found online. Everyone wants to “go viral,” as my dad would say. [Read more…]

May 12 2016

What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You

Reading Time: 4 minutes

When I was ten months old, my family was barbecuing outside on our small patio in Minnesota. At one point, my parents went into the house briefly to prepare the side dishes, and while they were inside, I decided to explore our patio. Since I had started walking when I was nine months old, I was pretty mobile for a youngster.

For some reason, I was captivated by our grill when I began my patio explorations. I’m not sure why I was, but I was. The bad part was that our grill had already been turned on, and it was extremely hot.

Filled with curiosity and ignorance, and before my parents could stop me, I turned around and touched the grill.

Ouch.

I burned my hand badly, and had to be taken to the hospital. Although I had second-degree burns, I would recover in time. It was only a temporary flesh wound.

You could learn a lot from this story, but one big takeaway for me was this: what you don’t know can hurt you. Ignorance has a price. This time the price of ignorance was second-degree burns, but when we’re older, the price can be much greater. [Read more…]

Feb 05 2016

The Best Places for High-Quality Stock Photos, GIFs, and Vector Graphics (Paid and Free)

Reading Time: 4 minutes

According to research done by developmental molecular biologist Dr. John J Medina, if people hear information they will only remember 10% of it three days later. However, if a picture is added to the information these people hear, they’ll remember 65% of the information. (Source)

In addition to this, consultant Jeff Bullas found that articles with images get 94% more views. (Source)

Images are a great way to capture attention, make your messages stick, and draw more prospects and readers into your content. You can use images on your website, landing pages, social media marketing, content creation, eBooks, presentation slides, and all sorts of other places. (Just be sure that you’re not violating the photo license rights/agreement!)

[Read more…]

Feb 02 2016

How to Increase Leads for Your Home Service Business

Creating a marketing strategy that continually generates leads is one of the hardest things for a business to do.

Mailers, door hangers, and good ole fashioned business cards used to be the lifeblood of home services marketing, but the internet has completely changed the game.

Online marketing can be incredibly overwhelming, so we’ve outlined a 5-step process that should give you a basic framework for generating leads through your website.